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I'm building the future of personalized healthcare for women—where biological…
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Kelly Lacob reposted thisWe are delighted to spotlight Kelly Lacob, CEO/ Co-Founder and Adriana Dantas COO/ Co-Founder of Xella Health! She is a brilliant leader and has the backing of many amazing funds: Precursor Ventures, Capital F, Swizzle Ventures, Ulu Ventures, Growth Factory Ventures, Dawn Dobras, Margaret Coblentz, Miriam Rivera, Jessica Kamada, Charles Hudson, Mia Farnham, Ariel Segal Eck, Jory Segal, ImpactAssets, Taylor Hansen,Kelly Lacob reposted thisWe’re excited to share that Xella CEO, Kelly, will be speaking at INVEST Digital Health in Dallas on October 29th! She’ll be joining the panel From Lab to Living Room: The Rise of Consumer Diagnostics to discuss the future of personalized health insights, clinical rigor, and what it takes to turn complex health data into meaningful care. We're looking forward to an important conversation about what’s next in healthcare! #womenshealth #healthcare
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Kelly Lacob shared thisWomen's health is at a turning point. I'll be at WHIS 2026; if you'll be there as well and would like to connect, reach out and let me know! #WHIS #MeetMeAtWHIS2026 #WomensHealthInnovation
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Kelly Lacob shared thisThis one is personal. When we started building Xella, it came from a question I couldn’t stop asking after losing my mom to ovarian cancer: What might have been different if we had understood what was happening in her body earlier? Over the last three years, that question has grown into something much bigger. More than 15,000 women joined our waitlist before we launched. Again and again, we heard some version of the same thing: 𝘐 𝘬𝘯𝘰𝘸 𝘴𝘰𝘮𝘦𝘵𝘩𝘪𝘯𝘨 𝘪𝘴 𝘨𝘰𝘪𝘯𝘨 𝘰𝘯 𝘸𝘪𝘵𝘩 𝘮𝘺 𝘣𝘰𝘥𝘺. 𝘐 𝘸𝘢𝘯𝘵 𝘵𝘰 𝘶𝘯𝘥𝘦𝘳𝘴𝘵𝘢𝘯𝘥 𝘪𝘵. 𝘈𝘯𝘥 𝘐 𝘸𝘢𝘯𝘵 𝘴𝘰𝘮𝘦𝘰𝘯𝘦 𝘵𝘰 𝘩𝘦𝘭𝘱 𝘮𝘦 𝘧𝘪𝘨𝘶𝘳𝘦 𝘰𝘶𝘵 𝘸𝘩𝘢𝘵 𝘵𝘰 𝘥𝘰 𝘯𝘦𝘹𝘵. To me, that is the real story behind Xella. Women don’t need more disconnected data, more isolated appointments, or another place to track symptoms. We need a healthcare system that can connect the dots—across our biology, our symptoms, our labs, our longitudinal data, and the different stages of our lives—and turn all of that information into something clinically meaningful and actionable. That’s what we’re trying to build at Xella. I’m incredibly grateful to Geri Stengel and Forbes for telling not just our story, but the story of the much larger healthcare gap we’re working to address. And I keep coming back to the line that closes the piece: what would earlier detection have changed for my mom? I’ll never know the answer. But building Xella is my attempt to make sure more women have the opportunity to find out sooner. #WomensHealth #FemTech #HealthcareInnovation #PrecisionMedicine #DigitalHealth #PreventiveHealth #HealthTech #XellaHealth #FutureofHealthcare #ClosingTheGapKelly Lacob shared thisMedicine was built on a male default. Women are paying for it with their health. 📊 Across 770 disease types, women are diagnosed four years later than men 🔬 Endometriosis takes up to 10 years to diagnose 💊 The FDA excluded women from early drug trials from 1977 to 1993 ❤️ Women with heart attack symptoms are sent home from ERs at significantly higher rates than men Kelly Lacob lost her mother to ovarian cancer. Three months later, she incorporated Xella Health. Today, Xella screens for 130+ conditions using multi-omic diagnostics and AI. It is built on infrastructure most health companies never bother to construct. The platform built a 15,000-person waitlist at $6 per lead. The industry norm is $20 to $40. That gap is not a marketing story. It is a demand signal. And this week, Xella announced a partnership with ŌURA—the world's most valuable standalone wearable company—to create the first connected precision health experience designed explicitly for women's biology. This is what it looks like when a diagnostics engineer rebuilds the infrastructure from the ground up. 👉 Read the full story in Forbes: https://lnkd.in/gAzxHKEN Adriana Dantas, Jesus Ching , Taylor Hansen, Chris Curry MD, PhD, Charles Hudson
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Kelly Lacob shared thisYour Oura data just got a care team! Xella is officially integrated with ŌURA, bringing everyday health insights together with Xella’s precision health + concierge care for women. The healthcare community has talked a lot about "connected care" in recent years and what it would mean to actually tie wearable data to clinical decision-making and health outcomes, but few have made meaningful strides. Xella is proud to be one of the first! You can now connect your Oura Ring to the Xella platform and, with the help of our clinical intelligence layer and Xella clinicians, understand the deeper issues that are driving changes in your sleep scores, HRV, resting heart rate, cycle patterns, and more. Not only that, but we have built a product layer that leverages Oura data to track how your body is responding to interventions recommended by your Xella care team, from prescription medications and supplements to nutrition and lifestyle changes. We tie the relevant biometrics back to the life stage transitions you are going through (e.g. fertility optimization, postpartum, perimenopause), the health conditions you are dealing with, and your overall health goals. This enables faster and more personalized care plan optimization. Behind the scenes, we are studying how we can integrate wearable data into our multi-omic detection technology to identify risks, diseases, and condition states even sooner. Both our teams at Xella and ŌURA love data. We love better health outcomes for women even more. Thank you Dorothy Kilroy, Chris Curry MD, PhD, Madeleine L., Kelsey Radloff, and the entire ŌURA team for your partnership! Everyone else, find us in your Oura app under Integrations, and get 20% off joining Xella! Find out more here: https://lnkd.in/g_HVXSHh
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Kelly Lacob shared thisI'm excited to support my co-founder Adriana Dantas as she speaks at the Women's Health Horizon's Summit next Tuesday. The panel topic is "Precision vs. Population: Can Women's Health be Personalized Without Breaking the System?" What do you all think?? Comment if you'll be there, so we can find time to connect!Kelly Lacob shared thisWe’re pleased to share that our Co-Founder & COO, Adriana Dantas, will be speaking at the WHH Women's Health Horizon's San Francisco Summit on September 1, 2026, hosted at the University of California, San Francisco Mission Bay Campus. WHH Women’s Health Horizons brings together leaders across capital, innovation, healthcare, research, and policy to accelerate progress in women’s health at scale. We’re looking forward to Adriana contributing to the conversation and connecting with others who are shaping the future of women’s health in the United States and globally. #womenshealth #womenshealthcare #healthcare
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Kelly Lacob shared thisI’m a few days late sharing this excellent feature from The Luteal, one of my favorite sources of intelligence on the women’s health ecosystem. Their reporting consistently goes beyond the headlines to examine the business, clinical, research, and policy questions shaping the field. Keisha Oleaga hit on something fundamental about the next generation of diagnostics and AI-enabled healthcare: 𝗕𝗲𝘁𝘁𝗲𝗿 𝗱𝗲𝘁𝗲𝗰𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻 𝗶𝘀 𝗼𝗻𝗹𝘆 𝘃𝗮𝗹𝘂𝗮𝗯𝗹𝗲 𝗶𝗳 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗵𝗲𝗮𝗹𝘁𝗵𝗰𝗮𝗿𝗲 𝘀𝘆𝘀𝘁𝗲𝗺 𝗶𝘀 𝗽𝗿𝗲𝗽𝗮𝗿𝗲𝗱 𝘁𝗼 𝗮𝗰𝘁 𝗼𝗻 𝘄𝗵𝗮𝘁 𝘄𝗲 𝗳𝗶𝗻𝗱. We are entering an era where we can measure more, connect more signals, and identify disease and risk earlier than ever before. But data alone does not improve outcomes. As Keisha points out, there is a built-in failure point in many consumer diagnostic models: a patient can arrive at her physician’s office with an extensive set of results, but that physician may not have ordered the testing, may lack the broader clinical context, may not have been trained to manage the conditions identified, and may have neither the workflow nor reimbursement model to take responsibility for the downstream care. This problem will only become more important as AI-enabled detection platforms become more sophisticated. 𝗧𝗵𝗲 𝗳𝘂𝘁𝘂𝗿𝗲 𝗼𝗳 𝗱𝗶𝗮𝗴𝗻𝗼𝘀𝘁𝗶𝗰𝘀 𝗰𝗮𝗻𝗻𝗼𝘁 𝘀𝘁𝗼𝗽 𝗮𝘁 𝗱𝗲𝘁𝗲𝗰𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻. These platforms will need to build the clinical infrastructure required to translate findings into care—or integrate deeply with existing healthcare systems so that provider preparedness, clinical decision support, follow-up, outcomes measurement, and reimbursement are addressed alongside the technology. This is something I’m incredibly proud of at Xella. We’ve invested deeply in advancing precision women’s health through AI-enabled, multimodal and multiomic detection. But from the beginning, we have been equally focused on what happens after we find something. For our direct-to-consumer members, that means a dedicated clinical care layer that reviews findings, develops and communicates the care plan, facilitates prescriptions and referrals when appropriate, and coordinates follow-up over time. And increasingly, it means working directly with healthcare organizations to integrate Xella’s intelligence layer, clinical decision support, provider education, and workflow efficiencies into the systems where women already receive care—an important part of the future we are building toward. Because ultimately, 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗴𝗼𝗮𝗹 𝗶𝘀𝗻’𝘁 𝘁𝗼 𝗴𝗲𝗻𝗲𝗿𝗮𝘁𝗲 𝗺𝗼𝗿𝗲 𝗵𝗲𝗮𝗹𝘁𝗵 𝗱𝗮𝘁𝗮. 𝗜𝘁’𝘀 𝘁𝗼 𝘁𝘂𝗿𝗻 𝗯𝗲𝘁𝘁𝗲𝗿 𝗶𝗻𝗳𝗼𝗿𝗺𝗮𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻 𝗶𝗻𝘁𝗼 𝗯𝗲𝘁𝘁𝗲𝗿 𝗱𝗲𝗰𝗶𝘀𝗶𝗼𝗻𝘀, 𝗯𝗲𝘁𝘁𝗲𝗿 𝗰𝗮𝗿𝗲, 𝗮𝗻𝗱 𝗯𝗲𝘁𝘁𝗲𝗿 𝗼𝘂𝘁𝗰𝗼𝗺𝗲𝘀 𝗳𝗼𝗿 𝘄𝗼𝗺𝗲𝗻. Thank you to Keisha and The Luteal for such a thoughtful examination of Xella—and, more importantly, of one of the biggest challenges our industry needs to solve.Kelly Lacob shared thisWomen are diagnosed an average of 4 years later than men across more than 700 conditions. Now with trackers, apps and tests, the biggest barrier in women's health isn't a lack of biological data. It's an outdated healthcare system that was never built to receive it. I sat down with Xella Health CEO Kelly Lacob to talk about exactly that. The reality of 10-year delays for endometriosis diagnoses, why standard primary care turns away 100-biomarker reports, and why a test is only as good as the care layer behind it. Her company was built around this structural gap. A multi-marker screen paired with dedicated clinical protocols, so patients aren't left stranded with raw data and nowhere to go. Meanwhile, most diagnostics funding still flows into individual testing panels. Better data points for a system that can't process them. The answers exist now. But the surrounding medical and regulatory infrastructure is just not there yet. Read the full conversation and subscribe👇 https://lnkd.in/dQRwEeRS
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Kelly Lacob shared thisLast week I joined an outstanding panel at Seattle Tech Week on 𝘛𝘩𝘦 𝘞𝘰𝘮𝘦𝘯'𝘴 𝘏𝘦𝘢𝘭𝘵𝘩 𝘖𝘱𝘱𝘰𝘳𝘵𝘶𝘯𝘪𝘵𝘺: 𝘞𝘩𝘦𝘳𝘦 𝘐𝘯𝘯𝘰𝘷𝘢𝘵𝘪𝘰𝘯 𝘔𝘦𝘦𝘵𝘴 𝘊𝘢𝘳𝘦 with Amy Compton-Phillips, MD (CVS Health), Elisabeth Tarullo (Nolia Health), and Jessica Kamada (Swizzle Ventures). We explored what it will take to bring the next generation of women's healthcare into mainstream care. One theme I kept coming back to is that we're finally making progress on conditions that have historically been overlooked—endometriosis, PCOS, and the unique ways cardiovascular disease presents in women. But there are still far too many conditions that women suffer through quietly because of stigma, normalization, or simply not knowing that what they're experiencing isn't "just part of being a woman." PMDD. Painful intercourse. Recurrent pregnancy loss. These conversations still aren't happening often enough. I was especially excited to share early findings from Xella's beta cohort because they reinforce just how interconnected women's health really is: • Women had an average of 𝟯.𝟵 𝗰𝗹𝗶𝗻𝗶𝗰𝗮𝗹𝗹𝘆 𝗮𝗰𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻𝗮𝗯𝗹𝗲 𝗳𝗶𝗻𝗱𝗶𝗻𝗴𝘀 and 𝟭𝟬.𝟱 𝗽𝗲𝗿𝘀𝗼𝗻𝗮𝗹𝗶𝘇𝗲𝗱 𝗵𝗲𝗮𝗹𝘁𝗵 𝗿𝗲𝗰𝗼𝗺𝗺𝗲𝗻𝗱𝗮𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻𝘀. • 𝟴𝟭% had symptoms they had been experiencing explained by Xella's findings. • 𝟵𝟯% had clinically meaningful findings spanning 𝗺𝗼𝗿𝗲 𝘁𝗵𝗮𝗻 𝘁𝘄𝗼 𝗵𝗲𝗮𝗹𝘁𝗵 𝗱𝗼𝗺𝗮𝗶𝗻𝘀, and 𝟲𝟰% had findings across 𝘁𝗵𝗿𝗲𝗲 𝗼𝗿 𝗺𝗼𝗿𝗲. • The most common overlap? 𝗖𝗮𝗿𝗱𝗶𝗼𝗺𝗲𝘁𝗮𝗯𝗼𝗹𝗶𝗰 𝗮𝗻𝗱 𝗿𝗲𝗽𝗿𝗼𝗱𝘂𝗰𝘁𝗶𝘃𝗲 𝗵𝗲𝗮𝗹𝘁𝗵. To me, this is a compelling argument for moving beyond siloed care. Women's biology doesn't operate in isolated systems—and neither should preventive care. The conversation with Amy Compton-Phillips was equally fascinating because we shifted from what's scientifically possible to what's required for enterprise adoption. For organizations like CVS Health and other payers, the challenge isn't simply believing the science—it's generating evidence quickly enough to justify changing clinical workflows, reimbursement models, and risk-bearing decisions. We talked about whether AI, consumer-generated health data, and new partnership models can help compress that traditionally long evidence-generation cycle. But we also acknowledged an uncomfortable reality: The incentives still aren't fully aligned. Innovators are trying to prove long-term improvements in health outcomes. Large healthcare organizations are trying to responsibly manage near-term risk. Those timelines rarely match. So I'll leave this community with the same question we ended our discussion on: 𝗛𝗼𝘄 𝗱𝗼 𝘄𝗲 𝗿𝗲𝘀𝗽𝗼𝗻𝘀𝗶𝗯𝗹𝘆 𝘀𝗵𝗼𝗿𝘁𝗲𝗻 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗽𝗮𝘁𝗵 𝗳𝗿𝗼𝗺 𝗽𝗿𝗼𝗺𝗶𝘀𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝗶𝗻𝗻𝗼𝘃𝗮𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻 𝘁𝗼 𝘀𝘁𝗮𝗻𝗱𝗮𝗿𝗱 𝗼𝗳 𝗰𝗮𝗿𝗲? What evidence, partnership models, reimbursement changes, or entirely new approaches do you think could help close that gap? I'd love to hear your thoughts.
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Kelly Lacob shared thisIt was such a pleasure to join Nora McCaffrey on Beyond the Bottom Line Podcast. We packed a lot into 30 minutes - give it a listen!Kelly Lacob shared thisIn today’s podcast episode, I’m joined by Kelly Lacob, Co-Founder and CEO of Xella Health, for a fascinating look at the future of precision medicine and the operational reality of commercializing frontier science. Kelly is a Stanford- and Johns Hopkins-trained bioengineer and technologist who has designed groundbreaking clinical products, from early CRISPR diagnostic platforms to the first FDA-cleared at-home PCR tests. We dive into Kelly's early career foundation, exploring how her experience translating highly complex science into scalable diagnostic tools paved the way for her current work. We also discuss Kelly's perspective on why moving women's healthcare from reactive to proactive requires building an entirely new dataset from the ground up, completely free from traditional male biology baselines. In this episode, we explore: - How designing early CRISPR platforms and rapid PCR test deployments prepared Kelly to launch a multi-omic platform for female biology. - The creative and technical challenges of decoding the XX chromosome directly rather than retrofitting tools built for men. - The shift toward using machine learning models to map how different biological systems interact with each other instead of analyzing test results in single silos. - How combining genetic, metabolic, and biomarker data with AI replaces clinical guesswork with definitive, root-cause clarity. - The severe structural fragmentation of the current healthcare system and why thousands of women are immediately jumping onto waitlists for unified, centralized data. - The immense potential of transforming menstrual fluid into a high-fidelity diagnostic resource to identify complex conditions like endometriosis. - The critical importance of the post-diagnostic experience and why Xella is anchoring its model on meaningful medical follow-through and guided patient action. This conversation is about the intersection of frontier science and digital health, the critical gap between reactive care and proactive longevity, and what it takes to build a comprehensive platform for female biology so that precision medicine is accessible to the everyday woman. 🎧 : https://lnkd.in/dVigaFgm #BeyondTheBottomLine #XellaHealth #WomenInHealthcare #HealthTech #Bioengineering #PrecisionMedicine #MultiOmics #HealthcareInnovation #WomenInTech #StartupGrowth #PreventiveHealth
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Kelly Lacob shared thisToday, Xella Health is officially live. Launching a company is stressful. Whenever I needed perspective, I'd remind myself: You know what's actually stressful? Repeatedly missing work because your period pain is so severe you can't get out of bed. Seeing another single line on a pregnancy test after your third failed IVF transfer. Feeling like you're losing your career, your relationships, and yourself because hot flashes, brain fog, insomnia, and hormonal changes have quietly taken over your life. Trying to convince your mother to eat anything because chemotherapy has left her weighing less than 90 pounds. 𝗧𝗵𝗼𝘀𝗲 𝘁𝗵𝗶𝗻𝗴𝘀 𝗮𝗿𝗲 𝘀𝘁𝗿𝗲𝘀𝘀𝗳𝘂𝗹. Yet for generations, countless women have walked into doctors' offices only to hear some version of, "𝘐𝘵'𝘴 𝘱𝘳𝘰𝘣𝘢𝘣𝘭𝘺 𝘫𝘶𝘴𝘵 𝘴𝘵𝘳𝘦𝘴𝘴." That disconnect is one of the reasons Xella exists. Two and a half years ago, my co-founders and I set out to build the healthcare we believed women deserved—even if the system wasn't ready for it. We were told the market wasn't big enough. That prevention didn't fit the reimbursement system. That clinicians wouldn't work this way. That there wasn't enough data. Ironically, there wasn't enough data because, for decades, few invested in generating it. Still, we kept listening to the women we were building for. We believed healthcare should be designed around female biology—not adapted from male baselines. We believed biology should be understood as an interconnected system. And we believed AI could uncover patterns that individual lab values often miss. A lot can change in two years. People say women's health is having a moment. I'm confident it's much more than that: healthcare is shifting from reactive to proactive, from one-size-fits-all medicine to precision medicine, and from isolated specialties to truly integrated care. This is the future we believed was coming. Today, 𝗺𝗼𝗿𝗲 𝘁𝗵𝗮𝗻 𝟭𝟱,𝟬𝟬𝟬 𝘄𝗼𝗺𝗲𝗻 who trusted us enough to join our waitlist can finally experience what we've been building. Xella analyzes 100+ biomarkers using female-specific reference ranges, systems biology, and AI to screen for 135+ conditions that uniquely or disproportionately impact women's health—helping women identify patterns earlier than traditional lab work alone. And while I'm incredibly proud of what we've launched today, I know this is only our first chapter. Ahead of us are clinical pilots with leading health systems, collaborations with world-class research institutions, major partnerships, and our most ambitious R&D yet. To every woman who shared her story. To the 15,000+ women who believed in us before there was a product. To our clinicians, researchers, investors, advisors, friends, families, and the extraordinary Xella team—thank you. Today is a milestone. Not because we're finished, but because we finally get to begin! If this resonates, I'd love to hear from you. Let's build what comes next, together.
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1w
Christina Fattore Thanks for the shout out! Sarah Goggin Happy to chat about it some time; I’m intrigued and excited by the work you are doing as well.
Kelly Lacob replied to a comment
1mo
Nicole C. Foster Thank you! We look forward to seeing more companies do this, and mutually learning from and collaborating with one another so we can all get to the next level sooner.
Kelly Lacob replied to a comment
1mo
Ahmar W. Completely agree. We are especially excited to have more longitudinal data to dig into in the coming months.
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Kelly Lacob liked thisKelly Lacob liked thisSo honored to work for the incredible Morgan Evans, the newest NAWBO-MN | National Association of Women Business Owners - Minnesota Chapter DISRUPTOR AWARD WINNER.
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Kelly Lacob liked thisKelly Lacob liked thisThank you BeautyMatter and Mariella Agapiou for including my thoughts on the future of AI in women’s healthcare. I've been building native AI systems for DTC brands for over a decade, and have seen firsthand the enormous potential for AI to transform a data-rich space, including healthcare. However, if we build it on a system that has historically overlooked women’s biology, we risk scaling the very biases we’re trying to solve. An excellent look at the companies working to change this narrative and build a more thoughtful, personalized future for women’s health. The goal isn't more technology. It's better answers, better care, and better outcomes for women. Read the full article: https://lnkd.in/g2BhujaQ Kelly Kovack #aiinhealth #womenshealth #reshapinghealthcareHow AI Bias Is Reshaping Women’s Health—and the Startups Trying to Fix ItHow AI Bias Is Reshaping Women’s Health—and the Startups Trying to Fix It
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Kelly Lacob reacted on thisKelly Lacob reacted on this🎉 I have some big National Math Stars news to share today: we've been awarded a 4-year, $30M grant by the National Science Foundation (NSF)! This is a substantial funding commitment, which is worth celebrating in and of itself. But it's also something bigger: a vote of confidence in our thesis that finding and developing extraordinary talent is important to our country's future. Read all about it here: https://lnkd.in/gcuEhwve. This was a huge effort by the team, and also involved lots of help and kindness from past grantees and external orgs. Special thanks to PJ Hoke, Teresa Lambe, Eric Kotin, Mindy Capaldi, Danielle Vazquez, and Kavita Mittapalli, PhD 🙏National Math Stars Awarded $30 Million Grant from NSF to Find and Support America's Top Young Math StudentsNational Math Stars Awarded $30 Million Grant from NSF to Find and Support America's Top Young Math Students
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